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You and Your Research (1986)
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 52 posts.
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Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
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Chesterton's Fence: A lesson in second order thinking (2021)
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
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Politics and the English Language (1946)
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
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It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)
It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinions about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Co...
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No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
The risks and harms associated with drinking alcohol have been systematically evaluated over the years and are well documented. The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
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Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Meditations On Moloch
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
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The Inner Ring (1944)
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
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A Tale of Unwanted Disruption: My Week Without Amazon
On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly…
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Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990)
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
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Tech Independence
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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I Can't Sleep
I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children
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I'm a very slow thinker (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)
Learn to improve the brightness and clarity of images in your mind's eye. Image Streaming is an easy technique to learn. Is it a cure for aphantasia?
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My Left Kidney
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I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and potential treatments are out of reach
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
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The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
This is not just “Kids these days”
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The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise
Around the end of high school, I started to get really into photography. My friend (let’s call him T) was also into it, which should have been great fun. But it wasn’t. Going shooting with him was never great, for a reason I didn’t figure out till much later. I wanted to take photos. T mostly enjoyed tinkering with…
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Effective Spaced Repetition
“To flash conviction on the mind.”
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Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.
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Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls